Parents and work
The Good Childhood Report, as presented in The Sunday Times last weekend by its authors, points out that mothers work more than they used to and juxtaposes this with the statement that children are increasingly cared for by someone else other than their parents.
This wording was unfortunate. We know that the media only holds mothers to be responsible for caring for children, both on the right and on the left. And so the resulting furore was inevitable: a repeat of the same old debate about whether mothers should or should not work. And, inevitably again, this leads to blaming mothers. This debate is of extraordinarily little use to parents, most of whom have very little choice about whether they work or not. There is a complete disconnect between the story writers in the media and the everyday experience of today’s parents.
The missing piece of the puzzle is fathers. If we hold them to be responsible, like mothers, for regulating their time between work and home, then a new possibility arises – totally new to the media, a part of everyday life for nearly every family in the UK – the mother can work AND the child can be cared for by a parent. Fathers already care for their children more than all professional childcare put together. No researchers have yet found any evidence that fathers caring for children leave the children any worse off than if they are cared for by their mothers, provided that the father has the sort of support a mother would get in the community (which is not always the case). (And it is important to distinguish between averages and individuals – in some families, the child is better off with the mother and in some families, the child is better off with the father. )
Fathers work a lot more than mothers and care for children less. So it is the fathers’ work that we should be looking at first, if we are to get more parenting time for children. Exactly the opposite of the media’s approach.
Debating fathers is a useful debate, because 70% of both mothers and fathers want more work flexibility and work flexibility is something that can be delivered if we shout hard enough for it.
The good news is that the Equality & Human Rights Commission is just completing a major study of work and family and this will declare that a fundamental priority for the future of work is that men and women both balance work and caring roles. The focus will be on men’s work – that is where the biggest change needs to happen.
Legislation around leave entitlements in the UK is a disaster. We have the biggest difference in leave entitlements between mothers and fathers in the world, contributing strongly to economic incentives for one parent to work full-time and the other to manage alone the balance between work and care of children. That is what happens when we hold only mothers responsible for rearing children. We are in a deep hole, with a system that is in continual positive feedback, driving parents into separate caring and working roles.
